Living With Trauma: The Healers, 40

Most humans beings live in climates that we're not naturally adapted to. Lacking fur or blubber, people have to depend on thick heavy clothing and indoor heating to get by during the ghastly winters of Canada and northern Europe. Yet we live there. For thousands of years people have lived in inhospitable climates. Even in the more temperate regions with perhaps two months of winter, it is not natural to our biology to live in such climates. Our insistence on living in cold climates has done a lot to devastate the biosphere. Vast tracts of Europe were deforested over the centuries, notably the British Isles, because of trees being cut down for fuel and building materials. Even before the Industrial Revolution London was a badly and dangerously polluted city. We really belong in the tropics and had we stayed in Africa, or didn't trouble to migrate much farther north than the Tropic of Cancer, then maybe we wouldn't have needed to develop the heating technologies using fossil fuels. Maybe the earth would have remained a healthier, more pristine planet. If any of you are having doubts, then may I suggest one little visualization? Imagine that summer has finally arrived, and what do people do? They take off as much clothing as they can legally get away with and, Ooh-la-la! Or, Oh my God!, if you didn't do well at fitness and weight loss. We are naturally adapted to warm weather, and that is our natural habitat. I have friends from Venezuela and Peru, respectively. They grew up living in tropical climates. Now that they are living here on the West Coast of Canada, which is still considerably less brutal for winter than other parts of this country, they complain bitterly about the cold weather and the impact on their health. When you consider how easy it is to adapt to living in a warm climate (not wretchedly hot, mind you, but warm)if you're from a colder region, then what more need I say? It is hard to know what further to say, given the restless exploratory instinct of our species, our ancestral hubris, and our evident drive to conquer and colonize, not only parts of the earth we have no business inhabiting, but even the prospect of other planets that cannot sustain life! I don't know whether we are stupid in our arrogance or arrogant in our stupidity. This need to colonize and dominate has made us the most destructive and pernicious species to crawl on the surface of this earth, and our superior intelligence has turned us into a particularly dangerous viral infection to this planet. We have not only been preoccupied with survival, but dominance, as though our overweening mentality is to compensate for our physical weakness and fragility. Rather like the way a small dog, for example, Chihuahua, takes on an attitude and ferocity more appropriate to a dog many time it's size (Honey! I shrank the pit bull!) Napoleon Complex, anybody? Our species does have an enormous capacity for good, to be good, to do good. But we are still way too stranded and entangled in the old, primal mentality of survival through dominance at any cost. Not co-existence but domination, control and the extermination of all opposing parties. Meanwhile the earth languishes under our misrule. We are very slow at coming to terms with this. There are many powerful interests and parties in the world who prefer the old way, resist change, and through their fear, stubbornness and greed are continuing to imperil the rest of us. These next few years are going to be pivotal to our future, all of us. Regardless the outcome, we are going to have a long, hard and very difficult struggle ahead of us.